Old in-active blog with duplicate content in the process of being deleted.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Via Virtual Earth via Worldwind

The Casey Chestnut VE Plugin for Worldwind is finally fixed for the new camera jitter code and in SVN under the unstable tree. So what is special about this ?

It looks like Microsoft has got a better deal with its satellite data vendor - GeoEye than Google - Digital Globe and Microsoft lawyers are allowing non-commercial, again strictly non-commercial usage of the plugin in Worldwind to show off Virtual Earth until the wonderful people at Redmond come up with their own virtual world respositioning any of the plethora of bits of code they have lying around, be it Mappoint, be it Flight Sim X. I would really love to see what Microsoft has to offer in the time-space model arena.

Another issue comes to mind along with this, why are the satellite vendors selling enter archives to Google-Yahoo-Microsoft instead of using their distribution network to sell scenes as they have always done? Are they not shooting themselves in the foot lowering the value of their data? I believe that is not the case they are gaining a lot of Market reach they could not gain with traditional sales teams. More people are now aware of the availability and quality of the high resolution satellite data and those who were going to buy a raw scene for a special purpose and scientific analysis in the high end are going to do so anyway at $6000 or so at a pop.

It also appears that GeoEye has been eating its cake and having it too, they have been selling imagery to both Microsoft and Yahoo. Not over the same areas though and sometimes not the same scenes, but Yahoo effectively has better coverage over Nairobi, CapeTown and Jo'Burg with Ikonos - Places I am heading to right now. Someone ask the Yahoo lawyers and make us a plugin.